Every weekend, Windows Central livestreams an Xbox One or Steam game for 1-2 hours and gives out free games to the cool people who join us during the stream.

It’s like a live podcast, only you also get to watch a game while chatting with our awesome readers and viewers!

Tonight on Mixer, we played Penarium, the quirky circus-themed platformer from Team17. Read on for quick impressions and contest winners.

Penarium

From indie developer Self Made Miracle and publisher Team17, Penarium is set in a sinister circus arena, where contestants, much like Gladiators of old, are forced to entertain a sadistic crowd. In this frantic 2D arena arcade game, you take on the role of our quirky antihero; Willy who, to survive, is forced to run, jump and avoid an array of killer death-traps.

With an appealing pixel art style and subversively dark sense of humor, Penarium is quite a unique co-op platformer. It’s easy to learn, with simple controls – players only need to worry about movement, jumping, and double jumping. But devious level design and a huge variety of traps mean that death is never far away for poor Willy. Players will have to stay on their toes to get this hapless kid back home!

Penarium costs $9.99 on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Steam. It’s also available in the Team17 Variety Pack (currently on sale for $24.75) which contains Penarium, Overruled, Beyond Eyes, and Schrodinger’s Cat – a $50 value.

See Penarium on the Xbox Store
See the Team17 Variety Pack on the Xbox Store

The Contest

We streamed Penarium for ~90 minutes tonight, starting at 9pm ET (8pm CT, 6pm PT, 2am GMT). During that time, we gave out a total of 13 game codes:

Seven for Xbox One

Three for PlayStation 4 (North American accounts only)

Three for Steam

See the winners at the end of this story.

What is Mixer?

We stream exclusively on Mixer, Microsoft’s interactive live streaming platform. It provides some welcome improvements over Twitch, such as a cleaner website layout, built-in stream interactivity, and extremely low latency.

You can follow our channel at Mixer.com/WindowsCentral. From there, you’ll be able to watch the stream and participate in chat directly from any web browser, including the Xbox One and Windows Phone browsers. Mobile apps are also available for Android on iOS.

Some of our handy Mixer guides:

Future streams

Want to know what’s next for Windows Central’s weekend Mixer programming? We stream a different game every Saturday (and sometimes Sunday). The stream always starts at the same time: 9pm ET (8pm CT, 6pm PT, 2am GMT). Over the next few weeks, we’ll be streaming the following (schedule not finalized):

September 23: Neverwinter: Tomb of Annihilation, the latest expansion for the free Dungeons & Dragons MMO. Win an exclusive Gorgon mount for Xbox One or PlayStation 4!

September 30: Killing Floor 2, the amazing co-op horde-style shooter from Tripwire Interactive. Win a copy of this fresh retail release and get ready to kill some Zeds!

October 7: Beyond Eyes, the beautiful adventure game from Team17 about how a blind girl experiences the world.

Winners

Come back here after the show to see the list of winners. These viewers are ready for the big time!

Xbox One

EpicQuiet

Thyrennia

WRider

REDRUN

drswoboda

NoTymeForGames

Dementcha

PlayStation 4

LightspeedChicken

rann78

SoulPrince

Steam

lilyk

Welsh_Overlord

JumiRobin

Tonight’s prizes provided by Team17. Thanks also to our stream moderators for keeping the peace and giving away the prizes!